Devlog #6: Beta wrap-up & next steps

Date: Fri, 02 Dec 2022
The Matriarch Game Banner
Genre: Casual
Developer: Chewa
Release Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2022
Hey Sinners,

First and foremost, thanks to everyone who participated in the beta, it was a quite big achievement, the demo was in the top 5 steam demo in term of concurent players (which peaked at 400!) and there were tens of thousands of players over just a few days! I'm thankful for all the feedback you shared and I can't wait to continue improving and preparing the game for the next phases.

Here is a quick update on what will be my focus in the upcoming weeks:


  • The most frequent feedback was that as a Sinner, you spend too much digging and not enough time pretending, which I agree is an issue, ideally I would like it to be 50/50, but currently rushing to dig seem to be the most efficient strategy to win (it's even more problematic when The Matriarch is inexperienced). There were some great ideas to counter it, like adding constrains to when you can use the trapdoors or limiting how many tiles you can dig each turn, but ideally I would want a solution that still allows this strategy but make it way more risky / less efficient. An idea which I'm going to try is that instead of having levers with a binary state (activated/deactivated), each lever will have a number that Sinners can change (like a padlock), the right combination to unlock the exit will be hidden next to the church and revelead progressively, which should encourage the Sinners to spend more time outside and also to communicate more with each others.

  • Another feedback was that having flexible game settings is great but can lead to unbalanced games, I will add recommended settings that change based on the number of players.

  • Stability also continues to be a priority, I'm happy to see that the last beta much more stable and the vast majority of you could join games and complete them without major issues but there are still a bunch of annoying glitches that need to be fixed. Bugs like the Matriarch journal not showing the correct information have already been fixed!

  • I'm also adding small quality of life features, I've just implemented to option menu that will let you configure the audio and resolution settings.




That's it for now, have a great end of the week, cheers!

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